Credit – Koekkoek—Connected Archives
By day, go to any park and you will see dogs walking their people and playing fetch. At dusk, cats perched on window sills catch our eyes even more. And in the dead of night, the children keep waking up as the pet hamsters make trouble in their cages. Our love for pets has never been fully demonstrated.
The numbers prove it. More than 1 billion animals are now kept as pets worldwide, with half of all households owning one. In the US, where pet-related spending is set to top $100 billion by 2021 for the first time, that number has climbed to a staggering 70%.
The conventional wisdom is that more pets equals more happiness. The expansion of pet keeping is a sign, says the pet industry, of an expanding love of animals and a widening circle of general happiness. People are happy because they have animal companions. Animals are happy because … well, we’re not really going to ask this question. If we do, we might not like the answer.
The truth is that keeping pets often causes great harm to animals. And as an ethicist, I am deeply concerned about the continued growth of pet farming around the world.
The many harms of pet care
Some injuries are what you might call attitudinal. In buying and selling animals, and in using them for our own pleasure—whether to provide entertainment or emotional fulfillment, or to make a profit—we treat them as objects, not subjects; as commodities and not as living beings with value. When an animal is a product, it becomes difficult for us to appreciate the animal’s experienced world from their own perspective. We wonder how our pets are doing to us feeling, not how we keep them as pets they feeling
Other injuries are more direct. A robust scientific literature leaves no doubt about the distressing experience of pets. Physical confinement, social isolation, and chronic exposure to stress—the hallmarks of captivity—can lead to measurable physiological damage, including loss of neural plasticity and a long-term activation of the fight-or- flying, which can affect immune function, increase the risk of chronic disease, and shorten lifespan. The psychological distress of captivity can be seen in certain harmful behaviors called stereotypies, such as a ferret running back and forth in its cage, a parrot pulling out all its feathers, or a dog “airing” or obsessively chasing his tail.
Read more: How Big Is A Dog Really? The Secrets of the Dog Mind
On a systemic level, the industry accepts significant animal suffering and death as part of its business model. A 2014 investigation of a major exotic pet wholesaler in Texas found that 80% of some 26,400 animals representing 171 species were “seriously ill, injured, or dead.” Ethically, consuming pets is no different than consuming meat: you have taken the life of an individual animal, and you have chosen to participate in an industry that inflicts suffering on living beings. A large commercial puppy or kitty mill or a warehouse full of snakes, geckos, and other small animals waiting to be shipped to pet stores is not that different from a scary factory farm. If you want to enjoy your pet/steak, it’s best to avert your eyes.
Even the billions spent on pet products each year often harm animal welfare. Some pet spending goes toward welfare-promoting goods, such as veterinary care. The lion’s share, however, is in products such as junk food, shock collars, bark deterrents, and cages and tanks. Marketing these products with catchy labels like “hamster hotel” or “hamster habitat” can make them seem benign. But imagine spending your entire life in a space not much larger than your body, with no meaningful work, no meaningful social interaction, no adaptive type of sensory stimulation, and no way to engage in behavioral patterns that you have evolved over millennia? It would be torture. Humans and animals are not that different in how they respond to captivity.
Dogs are probably the least captive pets. They are well adapted to the behavior of sharing the domestic space with people and can experience a rich and enjoyable life in our homes, sometimes with a high degree of independence. However, pet care practices still seem to be causing harm to them. Dogs experience social isolation, lack of behaviorally appropriate sensory input, physical confinement in small spaces, forced restraints, and other issues. Veterinary research has found that approximately three-quarters of all dogs suffer from anxiety severe enough to compromise quality of life—sad evidence of the felt effects of captivity.
Finally, and no less important, there are the climate effects of domestication. A 2017 study, for example, estimated that the meat-heavy diet of dogs and cats in the US is roughly equivalent, in terms of carbon emissions, to nearly 14 million cars on the road. Like industrialized animal farming, industrialized animal husbandry occurs on a scale that is ecologically unsustainable.
One way forward
Is it possible to develop companionate relationships with animals without causing harm to them or the planet? certainly But it will look very different from our current practices. The human-animal relationship will be mutual and freely chosen—friendship, not ownership. Captivity is no longer the central mechanism that holds animals within one’s orbit. Reducing the number of pets around the world, mitigating the worst effects on animals already living in captivity, and making their physical and emotional development our top priority will bring us closer to the goal.
People who love animals are, ironically, the same people who interact with pets. (I’m guilty as charged.) But we have to consider the possibility that loving animals is teaching us away from pet care and toward different kinds of animal friendships. Those that do not treat animals as commodities, do not involve captivity, and do not cause suffering.
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